INFORMATION UPDATE "Helping Businesses Find the Facts" July, 2001 Number 23 A Monthly Publication of Shamel Information Services mailto:InfoUpdate@shamelinfo.com ============================================================ Welcome to INFORMATION UPDATE, the free monthly newsletter for business and healthcare professionals. For subscription information, refer to notes at the end of this newsletter. ============================================================ ------------------------------------------------------------ IN THIS ISSUE ------------------------------------------------------------ => DO IT YOURSELF - Summer Travel => DID YOU KNOW - The Value of Indexing => Notes, News and Announcements => Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information ------------------------------------------------------------ DO IT YOURSELF - Summer Travel ------------------------------------------------------------ Planes, trains and automobiles. Whether you go to Belize or Santa Barbara, Boston or the backyard, summer often means getting out and about. Perhaps you will stay home and travelers will come to you. In any case, the Internet gives access to some interesting and fun travel related sites. Besides all the usual travel planning tools, Trip.com offers a nifty feature called flightTRACKER. http://www.trip.com/trs/trip/home/index_01.xsl Go to the Trip.com web site, and in the middle of the page there is a link to flightTRACKER. Click there, enter the flight information, and watch the progress as the little airplane image tracks the flight path. The data coming across includes estimated time of arrival and distance traveled. Amtrak trains offer an uncrowded alternative to air travel, and access to hundreds of tourist destinations including Orlando, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. The Amtrak web site gives detailed schedule information, including train status. http://www.amtrak.com/index5.html Then, there is always the Road Trip. Car travel still captivates the imagination as we seek to "see the USA in a Chevrolet" or "get our kicks on Route 66." In fact, at http://www.national66.com/ you can get a look at some of the sights along Route 66 and plan ahead for some of the up- coming events on the road. July 20-22 Albuquerque will host a spectacular weekend of events commemorating the 75th anniversary of Route 66. Whatever summer holds, have fun, stay cool, and be safe. ------------------------------------------------------------ DID YOU KNOW - The Value of Indexing ------------------------------------------------------------ To make it easier for users to find and retrieve resources, information managers have devised ways to arrange or label stored materials. Classification schemes create collections of related resources, usually according to subject matter. In cooking, recipes are often classed by the type of dish, such as 'salad' or 'dessert.' In libraries, The Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal System are examples of classifi-cation schemes. Classification of material helps the user browse the contents and locate things. Assigning keywords to material is a way to facilitate finding and retrieving information. Keywords give a detailed description of the concepts covered by the individual docu- ment and are mainly to aid in searching. Creating a list of keywords and methodically assigning those to database entries will add value to that database and assure better search results. The Internet in general is not indexed in this way. Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com is an example of an Internet Directory where entries have been assigned to one of 14 categories. Certain search engines such as Excite http://www.excite.com/ and FAST http://www.alltheweb.com/ use web crawlers to index selected web sites. Commercial databases tend to have the most powerful and functional indexing. A controlled vocabulary of search terms enhances the quality and quantity of results returned. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms assigned to entries in the Medline database is a well known example of a controlled vocabulary. Here is an example of the effects of indexing: We're looking for information published during the last year about drugs to treat prostate cancer, so we search Medline using the terms "prostate cancer AND drugs" This search yields 105 hits with varying relevance. By selecting terms from the MeSH list we search: "prostatic neoplasms" AND "drug therapy" The results list is a little more manageable with 56 very relevant hits. This concept of indexing applies to the databases offered by Lexis-Nexis, Dialog, and Factiva (Dow Jones Interactive). Shamel Information Services can conduct targeted, precise, and professional searches of commercial databases. We can help locate the information you need from newspapers, trade journals, scientific journals, business and financial papers, and newsletters. Let a professional help solve your information problems. Call 858-673-4673 ------------------------------------------------------------ Notes, News, and Announcements ------------------------------------------------------------ Intensive Review of Adult and Pediatric Allergy and Immunology July 06, 2001 - July 09, 2001 Boston, MA http://www.aaaai.org American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting 2001, November 5-8, Washington, DC. American Society of Indexers Annual Meeting 2002, May 16-19, Galveston, TX ============================================================= Information Update articles are now searchable on the web. Visit http://www.shamelinfo.com and click on "Newsletters." From that page you can enter your search terms to locate articles from past issues of Information Update. Give it a try and let us know what you think. The Shamel Information Services web site at http://shamelinfo.com contains Information Update archives. Just click on "Newsletters" and check for any issues you might have missed. -------------------------------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE -------------------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions to INFORMATION UPDATE are free. You may subscribe or unsubscribe by sending a message to: mailto:InfoUpdate@shamelinfo.com with SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Copyright 2001 Shamel Information Services Please feel free to forward this issue to colleagues, in its entirety. Other uses without permission may violate copyright. Online archives at http://www.shamelinfo.com/newsletter.htm =============================================================== Cynthia L. Shamel, editor Shamel Information Services Poway, California mailto:cshamel@shamelinfo.com Ms. Shamel is on the Board of Directors of the Association of Independent Information Professionals http://www.aiip.org, a Special Libraries Association, San Diego Chapter Director and a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals http://www.scip.org Telephone: 858-673-4673 Toll Free: 800-330-9939